The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age

The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age PDF Author: Allucquère Rosanne Stone
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262691895
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Human communication has traditionally revealed important aspects of identity such as gender, age and race. However, such information is now often masked by computer-mediated communications. This text examines the various ways modern technology is challenging conventional notions of gender identity.

At the Intersection

At the Intersection PDF Author: Thomas Rosteck
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572303997
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
This provocative volume is based on the premise that cultural studies and rhetorical studies address specific and parallel questions about culture, critical practice, and interpretation, and that opening up a dialogue between them can enhance both and provide a more complete understanding of society. Noted scholars across a variety of disciplines examine overlaps and contradictions between these approaches as well as critical and pedagogical issues that surface with their linkage.

Presence

Presence PDF Author: Allucquère Rosanne Stone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 626

Book Description


Critical Digital Studies

Critical Digital Studies PDF Author: Arthur Kroker
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442666714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
Since its initial publication, Critical Digital Studies has proven an indispensable guide to understanding digitally mediated culture. Bringing together the leading scholars in this growing field, internationally renowned scholars Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present an innovative and interdisciplinary survey of the relationship between humanity and technology. The reader offers a study of our digital future, a means of understanding the world with new analytic tools and means of communication that are defining the twenty-first century. The second edition includes new essays on the impact of social networking technologies and new media. A new section – “New Digital Media” – presents important, new articles on topics including hacktivism in the age of digital power and the relationship between gaming and capitalism. The extraordinary range and depth of the first edition has been maintained in this new edition. Critical Digital Studies will continue to provide the leading edge to readers wanting to understand the complex intersection of digital culture and human knowledge.

The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction

The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction PDF Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136820418
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction provides students with an accessible overview of the genre that explores how it emerged through competing, multifarious versions and the struggle to define its limits. Discussing the place of key works and looking forward to the future of the genre, this book is the ideal starting point for students and all those seeking a better understanding of science fiction.

Technology Matters

Technology Matters PDF Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262250748
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters. Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age—as children, we play with technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances—Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them—to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."

The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies

The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies PDF Author: Robin Mansell
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
ISBN: 0199266239
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Book Description
The production and consumption of Information and Communication Technologies (or ICTs) have become embedded within our societies. The influence and implications of this have an impact at a macro level, in the way our governments, economies, and businesses operate, and in our everyday lives. This handbook is about the many challenges presented by ICTs. It sets out an intellectual agenda that examines the implications of ICTs for individuals, organizations, democracy, and the economy. Explicity interdisciplinary, and combining empirical research with theoretical work, it is organised around four themes covering the knowledge economy; organizational dynamics, strategy, and design; governance and democracy; and culture, community and new media literacies. It provides a comprehensive resource for those working in the social sciences, and in the physical sciences and engineering fields, with leading contemporary research informed principally by the disciplines of anthropology, economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman PDF Author: Dennis M. Weiss
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191780
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
Though the progress of technology continually pushes life toward virtual existence, the last decade has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman bears witness to the attention paid byliterary theorists, digital humanists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and designers to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. The chapters reflect on questions about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as having equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism. Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman. Thus, this collection brings diverse disciplines together to foster a dialogue on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Sublime Communication Technologies

Sublime Communication Technologies PDF Author: Rod Giblett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230584020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
This lively new study is a critical cultural history of communication technologies, from railways and telegraphy to computers and the Internet, in which Rod Giblett argues that these technologies play a pivotal role in the cultural history of modernity and its project of the sublime.

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis PDF Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 147397173X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1151

Book Description
"A genuine one-stop reference point for the many, many differing strands of cultural analysis. This isn′t just one contender among many for the title of ′best multidisciplinary overview′; this is a true heavyweight." - Matt Hills, Cardiff University "An achievement and a delight - both compelling and useful." - Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London With the ′cultural turn′, the concept of culture has assumed enormous importance in our understanding of the interrelations between social, political and economic structures, patterns of everyday interaction, and systems of meaning-making. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, the leading figures in their fields explore the implications of this paradigm shift. Part I looks at the major disciplines of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, asking how they have been reshaped by the cultural turn and how they have elaborated distinctive new objects of knowledge. Parts II and III examine the questions arising from a practice of analysis in which the researcher is drawn reflexively into the object of study and in which methodological frameworks are rarely given in advance. Addressed to academics and advanced students in all fields of the social sciences and humanities, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis is at once a synthesis of advances in the field, with a comprehensive coverage of the scholarly literature, and a collection of original and provocative essays by some of the brightest intellectuals of our time.